Realism and Revolution

I have been preparing for my first foray into an online space for new writers and there has been much musing. The chosen site for this foray will be YouWriteOn.com, mainly because they are running the Next Big Author competition (competitions I should say, because there’s the May one and the July one), which I figure will lead to a surge in members and therefore a more serious chance of creditable feedback. I have great hope for the online ‘publishing’ industry that seems still in its infancy. As long as a small number of sites like YouWriteOn or eNovella can attract large membership communities, it is a self-sustaining industry. The members will submit their work, it will become known among the other members, the other members will buy the ebook and the author will buy other ebooks. But the fact that these sites are still babies in the world wide web shows surely it’s not quite as simple as that. It will take a long time to wean people off over-marketed, genre-copycat products from the big publishing houses, just as it has taken a long time to wean people off physical books. But the Kindle hit its Christmas boom last year and there is only one direction it can go from here.


The advice from published authors on the Next Big Author website is singularly grating. “Never open a book with weather,” from Elmore Leonard was one particularly vexing comment. I do realise that the first passage of a novel can make or break a submission in the current literary climate, but this advice is disheartening when you realise how many great and enduring novels have begun with bland background. Do you think Dickens’ "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," spiel would have been picked up by a modern literary agent? Too cliched and repetitive, surely. I’ve just read Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, which begins with a very unpromising: “It was a cold grey day in late November,” followed by a detailed and atmospheric description of the weather on the lonely moorland journey Mary takes to Bodmin. Would an agent pick that up today and immediately dismiss it? The unfortunate reality is: quite probably.


This advice is especially misleading, because agents and publishers are not looking for something new. Really new writing is too risky; it needs fostering and support from organisations like Peepal Tree Press, which had Arts Council funding announced today. Your Random House and your Penguin are looking for low risk. They know their readers have been hitherto fed a diet of high tension and fast action, stuff that pushes the boundaries of human cruelty to one another, page-turners (often written like films) that are designed to be read in a single night, thrown at the local library and another bought the following day.


Luckily, that’s the kind of thing I write (without the human cruelty, generally). Oh, one day I hope I’ll have the time and mental space to write a really awe-inspiring, intellectual novel, but that’s not going to happen while I’m simultaneously developing a back-up career in a vaguely interesting office job, in the process of getting my right to remain in this country made permanent, attempting to learn French, training for the London-Brighton bike ride (sort of) and still writing the trash that comes to me naturally.

Unfortunately, in my experience, however, the fact that I write heart-racing, high-tension, emotional (trashy) romance hasn’t made it any easier to interest an agent in my project. So I have to concentrate on writing a really, really good beginning, that has no evidence of snow, or silvery moons, or sticky summers-days or rustling leaves. I think I’ve found that beginning. It’s now about a year since I edited the beginning into roughly its current form. And I still like it. There must be something in that.